No Escape

...Or is there?

I hate spiders. So fucking much. 

As much as it pained me to search for images of tarantulas for my first digital art project in college, I had a blast making this. It wasn't until the start of this class that I got to use Photoshop CS6 extensively, and I've never felt so happy.   The goal of this project was to make my own "chimera," which is basically a cross between different kinds of animals (or, in our case, pretty much anything we wanted, since it didn't have to be just animals). For mine, I wanted to create a creature that embodied fears that animals instill in humans using vampire bats, tarantulas, and lions. Each of these animals poses a different kind of threat to humans (vampire bats can carry rabies but don't feed on human blood; tarantulas are scary but aren't often lethal to humans; lions, needless to say, can eat your feet!), but many of us still harbor an intense fear of them. The picture is supposed to illustrate a notion that no matter where we go, our phobias can always follow us (that is, unless you grow a pair and confront them, eventually). The reason the image is so dark is because I wanted to create a nighttime, nightmarish mood to it.